Can I be the first to say:
NNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
I guess the writing was on the wall considering the game has been in development hell for many years, but I still look back at the original announcement trailer and think about how cool this game could have been. It was essentially sold as Minecraft but better - with proper combat, better exploration, powerful dedicated modding tools, and more. It was to be created by the creators of probably the biggest Minecraft server ever, which meant they understood the ins and outs of the game and what it needed to improve.
What a shame. At least we got Vintage Story.
Custom engines claim another victim.
Game dev is hard. Game engines are apparently impossible and cost prohibitive these days, unless licensed out en masse. They’re killing studios and franchises left and right.
Moreover: changes that big go in the next game.
If you decide to roll your own engine, from the start… awesome. Especially when content-creation tools aren’t a huge deal, like if your game world is procedurally generated. Understand your scope, steal freely from existing libraries, avoid wasting your artists’ time.
If you try to switch engines mid-development, you are fucked. John Romero couldn’t make that shit work, just going from Quake to Quake II. Daikatana could have shipped before Half-Life and only missed colored lighting. Instead it’s a cautionary tale. Duke Nukem Forever didn’t even ship. They had a nearly-complete game, several times, but threw those out and started over.
You don’t have to throw anything out, to start a new project from scratch. Ship the damn game. Put different tech in the next one. If you don’t ship, there won’t be a next one.
Yeah, there’s a certain risk for rolling with your own engine, but if you start the project with the idea of having a custom engine you probably know what you’re doing and have taken into account the complexities of having a custom engine. IMO if you’re a group of small experienced devs having a custom engine is not really a show stopper, if you’re a junior the project probably isn’t even getting off the ground.
But changing the engine mid-project is almost always a huge decision and more often than not a killing blow for most projects. Depending on the stage of the project you’re guaranteeing adding a year or two to your development. It’s better to accept the limitations of the existing engine and compromise on the vision rather than swap engines in hopes of realizing the vision that got refined during development.
Totally agree. Make a game, not a game engine!
Though as an unrelated counterexample, Kitten Space Agency is doing a custom game engine and development is scary fast right now. They’re doing all the work in public and it’s wild how good the dev team is.
Sometimes there’s a rock hard justification. Orbital mechanics is a great one. Game engines are literally not built for physics at celestial scales.
KSA’s feature scope is way narrower than, say, a game with tons of NPCs and voxels and elaborate foilage and MMO-scale multiplayer and such. The DayZ guy and that studio are also pretty experienced at this point.
So yeah, I agree! And I’m glad KSA is seemingly progressing well, actually…
Noita and Exanima are also two great explanations of when to make your own custom game engine: when nothing else on the market does exactly what you need your engine to do.